| Article ID: | iaor20084143 |
| Country: | Japan |
| Volume: | 50 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 350 |
| End Page Number: | 375 |
| Publication Date: | Dec 2007 |
| Journal: | Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan |
| Authors: | Umetani Shunji, Mutsunori Yagiura |
| Keywords: | combinatorial optimization |
The set covering problem (SCP) is one of representative combinatorial optimization problems, which has many practical applications. The continuous development of mathematical programming has derived a number of impressive heuristic algorithms as well as exact branch-and-bound algorithms, which can solve huge SCP instances of bus, railway and airline crew scheduling problems. We survey heuristic algorithms for SCP focusing mainly on contributions of mathematical programming techniques to heuristics, and illustrate their performance through experimental analysis.